THE HEALER'S ART: A New Approach to the Doctor-Patient Relationship

There are bone men. And heart men. And ear, nose, and throat men. And lung men. And skin men. But here is a doctor, who knows how to treat the whole person--to differentiate between the illness and the disease, and to treat both of them together. This, then, is a treatise on practical ethics for the physician. . . a plea from this sane and rather gentle man to cure the patient and to temper the pill-pushing with sophisticated country-doctor common sense. He begins with a description of the psychosomatic components in somatic disease, and illustrates his points with examples from his own medical files. He ends with a remarkable description of his method of treating the terminally ill. It seems that if a dying person is treated with tempered compassion by his physician, if a bond develops so that the doctor's knowledge can merge with and confirm and moderate what the patient is feeling, then he can die in significantly less mental and physical pain than one who is left to deal with his own feelings, clinging to the hope of a miracle. A persuasive and moving book.